Chapter 11: The Party Comes Early

On the thirteenth day, at noon, the Hall's party came up the mountain a day early.

Woo-jin heard them before he saw them.

A great gust of noise rolled up the gate stairs.

A cart axle shrieked and a woman scolded, and over all of it one young man's voice sang about a pig.

Woo-jin was in the courtyard with Mu-yeol, going over the River Fork on a map drawn in the dust.

Mu-yeol stopped in the middle of a sentence.

Woo-jin watched the color leave his face, and then come back all at once.

"That's him," Mu-yeol said.

"Mu-yeol..."

"That's his singing. He sings it flat."

Mu-yeol was gone.

Woo-jin had seen him cross a field under arrows without hurrying.

He had never seen him run across the courtyard with his robe flying and the beads loose on his wrist.

At the gate a skinny young man in faded red had just climbed down from a cart.

A ladle stuck out of his belt, and his pack was bigger than his torso.

Mu-yeol lifted him clean off his feet.

"Brother!" the young man yelled. "Brother, put me down, you smell like Alliance soap!"

Mu-yeol did not put him down.

He stood in the middle of the Iron Crane gate with his eyes shut.

His face was pressed into the other man's messy black topknot, and he was shaking, while the entire Truce pretended not to look.

"You're early," he said, in a rough, unsteady voice.

"I had a bad dream."

"I dreamed you were standing somewhere, looking at me like I was a ghost."

The young man pulled back, squinting.

"Why are you crying?"

"I'm not."

"You are. You're crying and you're holding me too tight, I can feel my ribs. Brother."

"Sim Yoo-chan," Mu-yeol said, as though reading a name off a stone.

"You will eat everything I put in front of you for a year."

"That's the best thing you've said to me in ten years."

Woo-jin stood a little way off with his hands clasped.

He could not move.

Yoo-chan was twenty-four years old and five feet nine, with a round cheerful face and ears that stuck out slightly.

He was laughing.

He was alive.

Woo-jin had pictured that face a thousand times, and in every picture it had been under a sheet.

Mu-yeol turned and held out an arm to Woo-jin, and Yoo-chan followed his eyes.

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